World Exclusive: Vista Ultimate to be $450 on Microsoft.com Canada
Microsoft.com Canada has released pricing for Windows Vista. Coincidentally, Microsoft has now removed the price list. Above is an image of the price list before it was removed. Sadly the page itself was not cached by Google in time. I should have thought about taking a local copy of the site, but sadly I did not. I do feel somewhat happy that a story I broke is showing up all over the world today. *pats self on the back*
All Canadian to US conversions were done using the Bank of Canada website
Prices in U.S.D as of 8/28/06
Vista Ultimate
-Upgrade: $269.931
-Full Retail: $450.581
Vista Home Premium
-Upgrade: $179.691
-Full Retail: $269.931
Vista Home Basic
-Upgrade: $116.483
-Full Retail: $233.862
Vista Business
-Upgrade: $224.832
-Full Retail: $342.215
I’m still alive, I promise
Yes, I am still a live. I’ve been quite busy working on a project for a client. I’ll have a little free time this week. Expect something then… 
Richard Bowles’ Idiot’s Guide to Neural Networks
Idiot’s Guide to Neural Networks
If you use the ‘Search’ option on your browser to look for articles on Neural Networks or “Connectionism” (which is another name for the same subject), you will find a great many sites explaining what they are and how they work. Unfortunately, they all seem to be written by mathematicians, all of whom speak Double Dutch. This is fine, providing you speak fluent higher mathematics, but when I wanted to find out how they worked, I looked from a programmer’s point of view.
This might be interesting to some of you, and a certain someone *wink wink* 
Photo-deblurring Research Debuts at Siggraph Conference
Photo-deblurring Research Debuts at Siggraph Conference
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Toronto research team debuted photo-deblurring technology at yesterday’s 33rd Annual Siggraph Conference in Boston, MA. The anti-blurring mathematical model can only correct a particular type of blur caused by hand motion. As digital cameras and camera cell phones gradually shrink in size, the model can accommodate the recent phenomena of hand motion with lightweight cameras. The algorithm is based on the principal that slight hand motions of even only a few millimeters cause camera rotations, resulting in image blur according to researcher and post-doc Rob Fergus in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Very cool technology that looks to be quite promising based on the example shown in the demonstration.
Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth
Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth
Photosynth is an amazing new technology from Microsoft Live Labs that will change the way you think about digital photos forever.
Gotta love sweeping overly dramatic product descriptions...(generally it’s good practice to avoid words like “forever").
Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.
With Photosynth you can:
* Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
* Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size.
* See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
* Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing.
* Explore a custom tour.
* Send a collection to a friend.
Well I have been putting off this post a few days in hopes that they would finally release this public technology demonstration that they said is coming soon, but that doesn’t seem to be happening just yet. Sooo, I thought I’d go ahead and write a little bit about this. Let me just start by point this out:
The above link to “Photo Tourism” is only loosely based on what you’ll see once this software is ready. The Photo Tourism example is also up on a server somewhere running inside Java. Needless to say (but it needs to be pointed out), it runs a lot slower than it will when it’s on your computer.
Software or ideas come along like Photosynth maybe once a year or so. This is definitely one of those things that make the nerdy parts of my brain tingle with excitement. The possibilities for this Photosynth software are virtually impossible to fathom. The technology could be applied to medical imagining, tourism (as the rough example shows), real estate, and a plethora of other fields. I don’t want to say “this is what it does and what it can do” simply because the example I am linking to is not exactly the newest version of the code. Once we get the first public technology preview a in depth write up will soon follow.
So, play with the demo...learn what type of things this technology enables, and generally try to hold yourself back from saying “oh wow” and “ok, that is cool” more than 10 times. (I said both of those at least 18 times).